The first bench downtown was modest, just sanded wood with no paint. It was stamped with the words, “TO NASHVILLE WITH LOVE.” The next few were splashier, with bright colors and designs.
Now, at least 100 handmade benches have appeared at bus stops and elsewhere around the city, providing a place for riders to sit and wait.
But the benches, built by a band of civic-minded residents to fill a need they saw the city as neglecting, have become a flashpoint in the debate over whether Nashville is spending enough on its own residents as tourism becomes an ever-larger focus.
The city keeps removing benches, citing complaints and accusing the volunteer group of violating traffic laws with their placement. City officials say they are addressing the lack of benches — and could legalize those made by the group — but bureaucracy is slow.
“A lot of people use them — and also they just make the city prettier,” said Ivie Tran, 18. “What’s the problem with having your community sit down?”
Other American cities have removed benches to deter homeless people from loitering or sleeping. Indeed, the first handmade bench to appear in Nashville last summer served as a rebuke to the city after it had removed metal benches from a prominent downtown boulevard.
In a statement last year, the bench builders called seating at bus stops an “issue of basic human dignity,” and their efforts “a nonviolent protest against a city that insists upon hostile design.”
But as the effort expanded, it also became a grass-roots way of addressing the demand for public transit in Nashville. Higher gas prices helped increase ridership by 20 percent over three months.
A voter-approved program has slowly funded new shelters, benches and other transit changes — about 350 of the nearly 1,600 bus stops now include shelters, up from about 100 a decade ago. But many stops still lack seating or even a sidewalk.
The volunteer group has helped build and place benches over the last year, using donations and bulk purchases of wood. Ben Hubert, 31, a chemist, helped design a bench as “simple as humanly possible,” he said.
“We can’t stand to see people standing on the side of the road,” he said. “We’ll do this for as long as people are willing to help chip in.”
Nashville officials are not, they say, opposed to providing places for riders to wait. But the city has removed some benches, arguing they were improperly placed. (The group denies this.)
Mayor Freddie O’Connell, a Democrat, said the city is merely trying to avoid liability.
An issue “tough for our legal department to swallow,” he said, “is who accepts the liability if something goes wrong.”
He noted the city has received complaints — especially, organizers have said, regarding benches painted with the phone number of a group that documents immigration enforcement. (He acknowledged that he found the benches in his neighborhood lovely.)
In a statement, Nashville’s Department of Transportation said that officials were working toward formally permitting the benches.
Some organizers are familiar and vocal critics of policing and other policies. They have bristled over what they say is a lack of funding for Nashville neighborhoods while taxpayer dollars go toward a new football stadium and business development, more evidence, they say, that tourists take priority over residents.
A bench, “is a symbol about a humane city,” said the Rev. Robin Lovett-Owen, 33, who helped place the first one. She added, “as a symbol, it’s immediately salient — it’s legible to people that people should be able to sit down.”
But as word has spread about the project, it has increasingly drawn people for reasons that have less to do with protest or activism.
“It’s been a sort of great conversation starter about community and how we can take care of others,” said Sharon Whitmore, 43, who had noticed the benches while driving.
Griffin Pacey, 27, drove to a recent Saturday morning bench-building event from nearby Hermitage with his partner. It was, Mr. Pacey said, a matter of “just looking for more ways to be involved in our communities. And we both love building things.”
With the bars and pedal taverns of downtown Nashville as a backdrop, organizers lined up two rows of completed benches for display on a recent steamy weekend. It was part of an event — sponsored in part by the Nashville Department of Transportation — where the group marked a year since they had started appearing.
The winning bench, it was decided, belonged to Ms. Whitmore, her husband and her two sons, Max and Teddy. It was blue, with silhouettes of animals and the capitalized words, “MIGRATION IS AN EARTH RIGHT.”
It was time to move the benches to nearby streets. One by one, they were loaded onto cargo bikes or into a pedicab covered in pink feathers.
It was unclear, the organizers acknowledged, how long they would stay put. At least for now, they said, people waiting for the bus could take a seat.
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